


These Deeds That Have Made Me

by bookhousegirl



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Canon Backstory, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-25
Updated: 2014-05-25
Packaged: 2018-01-26 12:07:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1687745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookhousegirl/pseuds/bookhousegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s what’s in his heart that he should be worried about. Exploring the backstory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Deeds That Have Made Me

**Author's Note:**

> I have always been deeply intrigued by a minor plot point late in Season Two that is a bombshell for so many characters: the undetermined paternity of Donna Hayward, and how Benjamin Horne fits into her mother Eileen’s life. Many thanks to my friends Maureen and especially KC who were the only people I knew who watched the show recently and were an excellent sounding board for how this all could have gone down. I had to mess with the timeline (Johnny’s age) just a little bit to make this work. I did diverge from the canon for the last part of this story; I just couldn’t bear to leave it with what the show gave us. 
> 
> Title from Neko Case’s Furnace Room Lullaby, which I feel is a definitive Benjamin Horne sort of song.

*****

The sky had never looked quite like this, he thinks, regarding the expanse of grey as he gazed up. It’s laughable, a day like this, at a time like this. His fingers curl around the cigarette as he blows smoke up towards that damnable sky. He regards the glow of orange and ash and thinks only momentarily about pressing it into the palm of his hand. On second thought, he throws it onto the colorless cement, grinds it into his shoe. The bell signaling the end of lunch is ringing.

Ben is about to turn and go when he suddenly feels like not only doesn’t he want to, but he can’t. He slouches down, back against the wall, white-washed concrete blocks and the hardness and cold seeping through his sweater, snagging on the cashmere. He sinks to the patio and sighs, pulling out another cigarette. He is going to get reamed out by Mr. White now, but whatever. Who fucking cares.

There is a noise next to him, and he turns his head to see Eileen Mortimer next to him, stuffing her hands, which don’t have gloves on, into the pockets of her red peacoat. She is wearing a plaid beanie hat on her head of dark curls and Ben smiles a little bit because it looks sort of ridiculous. But then, as far as he knew, Eileen didn’t seem to care about what people thought. He likes that she’s a weird bird.

“I’ve heard those things are bad for you,” she gestures to his cigarette that he has not actually lit yet, where he is just flicking the lighter over and over again. “They can kill you.”

He snorts and curls up his mouth, in not precisely a smile, gazing up at her from his spot on the ground. “God, I fucking hope so.”

“I heard about your mom.”

“Well, yeah. Then I am sure you heard about my epic breakdown too.” Ben turns the cigarette over in his hand.

“Doesn’t matter.” She shifts her weight a little bit. “I had an epic breakdown, when my mom died. I didn’t come out of my room for weeks. And I did this.” Eileen pulls up the sleeve of her coat and shows him her arm, which has tiny, ugly, raised lines, scars, running up her pale skin.

Ben snatches her wrist and then pushes it away. “What the hell. You shouldn’t do that.” He snaps it out and then thinks about how he had contemplated pushing that glowing cigarette into his own wrist not fifteen minutes earlier.

“Kind of Emily Dickinson of me, right?”

“Kind of fucked up of you, if you ask me.” He catches her eye. “I mean it. Don’t do it again. Don’t be a psycho.”

She shrugs. “I’m not having an epic breakdown anymore, Ben. But I felt a lot, when my mom died. You must be feeling a lot.”

Ben laughs a little bit, and scans the field where the fifth period gym class has just come out to play field hockey or something. He sees Sylvia, a girl that he sometimes fools around with, her dark hair unruly and whipping in the wind. She is laughing with her friends and dancing around in her field hockey skirt. Ben wonders if he’ll be able to get to Horne’s, where Sylvia works at the perfume counter, and convince her to give him a hand job in his father’s office.

“Thank you for your insight, are you angling to be my shrink?” he asks, a little tightly. “You think you have some kind of knowledge about what I must be going through because your mom died too? Because you don’t know _jack shit_.”

He punctuates the last two words. She looks down at him, his mouth now pursed and his eyes focused only on the cigarette in hand. He doesn’t want to look up at her. “Benjamin Horne, always so angry with the world and ready to be misunderstood.” Her tone is light, almost amused, as if she’s uncovering some huge secret and is inordinately pleased with herself.

Well, she hasn’t, Ben surmises. “Is that right? You think you’ve got it all figured out, do you? You’re going to understand?”

Eileen raises an eyebrow when he finally looks up again. Her eyes are sharp and cold, not unlike his own, he thinks. She seems to want to match wits with him, go toe to toe in whatever this is. “I already do.”

The air is cold and slightly damp between them and hanging there is the possibility of something, a fight, or a fuck maybe. Ben shivers a little bit, realizing he did not bring his own coat outside for this extended lunch break. He tilts his head back and laughs, at her cockiness, at her brashness, at the absurdity of it all, this girl that anyone else would see as reticent and stuck up and awkward and weird, talking to him this way. “Do you want to get out of here?” he tilts his head, gesturing towards the parking lot where his car sits.

She nods. “Sure.” And she reaches down with her tiny hand, fingers fitting to his, to help him off the ground.

*****

They go to the Double R, in the middle of the day, for milkshakes. Eileen gets a strawberry shake and sips it primly, her shiny black shoes just barely touching the diner floor, as she swings her foot back and forth at the booth. Ben ignores the looks they get from the surly waitress, who probably can’t decide whether she wants to report them to the high school, or not deal with Ben Horne and all his shit. She obviously decides on the latter.

He slathers a french fry in ketchup and pops it in his mouth. “Why are you wearing that hat? It looks silly.”

“I like it.”

“Well, you could come into Horne’s and get a much better one. One that doesn’t look so ridiculous, frankly.”

She sighs and stares across the booth at him. “Are you excited about Penn?” she asks instead.

“I can’t fucking wait.” He pauses. “Are you going to college?”

She shakes her head. “No. My father can’t afford it and there’s no reason for me to go. I’m just going to get a job at the library or be an assistant at the new doctor’s office. Something like that.”

“Well, don’t sell yourself short or anything,” he quips. She looks a little hurt, her face drawing up like she just bit into a lemon instead of her maraschino cherry. “No, don’t do that. I just mean, I know you’re smart, you could do something else.”

“Sure. But we’re not all Benjamin Horne. Some people have to worry about money. And consequences. I’m not free to just do anything with my life because I think there might be potential.” She swirls her straw around the milkshake, which is quickly melting and only half-finished.

Ben looks at his watch, and he’s definitely not going to make it to Horne’s in time for Sylvia’s shift now.

“It’s just not really the way I want to live. Benjamin Horne or not. Is it the way you want to live?”

She smiles at him, and there’s something darker there, like there is something secret that she’s holding on to. “I just want to build a life in happiness.”

He pays and when they leave, he smokes a cigarette as she leans up against the bricks next to the double glass doors of the Double R, staring at the sky. It’s almost dusk now and the sad, grey clouds, hanging heavy with potential rain, are mixed with slants of sunlight. He slides his long fingers against her pale, creamy throat for just a second.

She smiles a hazy, mysterious smile and says, through a puff of smoke, “You could fuck me, you know.”

Ben stares coolly. He takes a long drag of the cigarette and says quietly, huskily, “No. I don’t think so. Not yet,” and finally breaking the gaze, turns and walks towards the car.

*****

Philadelphia is a genuine goddamn playland for Ben. He understands that this is a four year sojourn for him, to get the smartassery and angst worked out of his system so he can come back to Twin Peaks and take over for his father. It’s fine. It’s all fine with Ben. He actually enjoys being a big fish in a small pond back home, instead of just a fish here at Penn. Philadelphia is good for liquor and cigars and loose girls named Christina and Betty and Joyce, who wear tight sweaters and don’t need to be talked into a hand job or a blowjob or more. Most days he doesn’t even think about any of it, lolling around, going to class when he feels like it, getting decent enough marks. He drinks and goes to parties and charms people with his manic grin and natural excitability, which is coming through more now that he is away from whatever oppressive forces (his father, his mother, his history, his own insolence) kept him chafing and pissed off in Twin Peaks. He is growing into Ben Horne now, someone who will be unstoppable in at least the small business world of the pacific northwest, and someone who has started getting used to taking, taking, taking.

He doesn’t know why he started with the letters. But the thing about Eileen is, he just feels better knowing she’s out there, getting him. Most of the letters are random things, nothing of significance, they’re not _dating_ for god’s sake. But the thing about Eileen is, he’s never sure where he stands with her, or what she thinks about anything. It drives him crazy, in a way that he likes. Not like when he was suffering from his mother’s loss, angry at his father and Jerry and the world.

 _I think you would like this place I went for lunch_ , he writes. _They had amazing strawberry milkshakes, with real strawberries that come from some tiny nowheresville farm in Amish country. But those Amish can grow a strawberry. It tastes like heaven in a sundae glass and I’d like to see the look on your face when you taste it_.

He tries to keep the letters impersonal and just intriguing enough. It’s not like he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s not worried that she’ll forget about him, not really anyway, she lives in the town where they grew up, in the town he’ll return to and own like a boss, he is Ben Horne, _obviously_. But she’s different than anyone else he’s known, and he doesn’t know what to expect. There are no expectations, and Ben simultaneously loves that, because life has been too much about expectations for so damn long, and is confounded by that too. Because why has this girl, this ordinary, diminutive, strange girl, invaded his life like this? It never should have happened, and Ben is kind of annoyed at himself for letting things go this far in the first place. But he thinks back to that day in the diner and her proclamation about building a life in happiness and for a second, Ben just gives in.

 _I don’t know about you, but I miss my mother more than I can bear. I didn’t even really appreciate her enough when she was here. And it was so hard to see her at the end, when she didn’t know where she was, or who she was. This is going to sound completely bizarre but sometimes I thought I saw her when I walked in the woods. I know she’s not there, and I don’t know what it means that my mind wished she were. It scares me to death_.

She never writes back. They don’t get returned though, so he is fairly certain they go to her house. But she never writes back and he thinks, with a small smile to himself, that’s exactly like her. Indescribable.

*****

The world of Twin Peaks keeps turning without Ben Horne in it, obviously, but he makes it a habit not to go back and check on it in his absence. His father is sick, during his first winter break at Penn, and he doesn’t think he can bear it, so he buys pack after pack of cigarettes and cheap vodka and stays in his dorm room, reading and sleeping and getting drunk. Over the summer, he doesn’t return either, and instead goes to New York, meets with some business people, does a few odd jobs, and makes $1000 trading some fake tickets on the street. He feels oddly alive.

It continues this way every year. He stays on campus during the winter and goes to New York in the summer. Ben isn’t avoiding anything, god he’s not that stupid or even self-conscious to admit that. He gets his updates from Leland, that Sylvia is still prancing around Horne’s perfume counter like some kind of jailbait stripper cum sales person, that a new doctor, Will Hayward, has come back from medical school in Iowa and opened up his practice, that Eileen is still working at the library and a few hours at the hospital candy-striping or whatever. This is sufficient for Ben’s interest. Honestly if he knew more, if he heard she was beautiful, or happy, or anything like that, he’s not sure what he would do with the information.

Senior year changes things up, and Leland leaves Northwestern to come and visit. One thing Ben can actually admit is that he is grateful for his best friend’s arrival. Leland has always been the more practically focused one, the one who grounds Ben in some way, the one who is a madcap partner, but also a moral compass. Leland is completely up and down, high and low, though, spouting off about the atmosphere back home, _doesn’t Ben miss it?_ , and the woods and the falls and darkness and all kinds of crap that Ben barely listens to as he drags Leland along Walnut Street so they can go to the bar and get hammered. He’s talking about Sarah, because they have been _dating_ , Leland is absolutely the type who _dates_ girls, and getting into law school and trying to decide between U Chicago and just going to University of Washington back home.

“I really love Chicago, but sometimes I just feel like I want to go home, back to Washington. Back to Twin Peaks. There’s too much hustle in the city. It’s too busy, too crowded, it’s too much.” Leland throws his cigarette into a snowbank and they watch the ash stain the white crystals. “Don’t you feel that way?”

“I guess so.” Ben just shrugs. “Sometimes I guess. It’s lonely there too, though.” He tugs on Leland’s coat sleeve and they continue on. It’s too cold to wax philosophical on the street in the middle of December in Philadelphia.

Leland has a weird look on his face as he looks up at the streetlight. “I like the loneliness. It reminds me of my place in the world.”

Ben can only squint his eyes and scoff before tossing his own cigarette away.

They enter the bar and it’s dimly lit and smoky and marginally warmer. “It’s a special place though,” Leland is saying, letting Ben push him towards a booth in the back. They sit opposite each other and Ben automatically stretches out his legs and kicks up his feet so that they rest on the bench next to Leland. “Kind of magical, right?”

“Are you smoking something that you didn’t offer your best pal Ben?” He grins amiably and says, “Because you are talking some whacked out shit, Leland. Come on, stop going on and on about the fir trees and the fresh air and the loneliness. Give me the good stuff.”

Leland seems to snap back. “Oh, right, so Sarah says that Nadine and Ed have gotten together.”

“Boring,” declares Ben dismissively. “Seriously, are you some kind of gossip columnist, or is it just Sarah?”

His friend chuckles. “It’s just a small town, Ben. I don’t think there’s anything worthy of a daytime drama going on.”

Ben’s attention is being lost rapidly, so he looks around to wave over a waitress to take their beer order. Leland is saying, “There is this one thing about Eileen that I heard -” but he gets cut off by the arrival of a perky redhead named Alice who clucks, “You boys are going to be trouble if I ever saw it.” They order two pints and a chaser of whiskey each, and when Ben turns back, Leland doesn’t continue his previous line of conversation. Ben shakes it off, running the pads of his fingers along the roughened and splintery top of the edge of the booth, where he’s casually draped his arm. When the drinks arrive, he knocks back the whiskey, slamming the glass to the table, and muses that he must have heard Leland wrong and doesn’t think about it again.

*****

Ben makes it very clear, in no uncertain terms, that Jerry should not come from the University of Washington, where he has just finished freshman year, to Philadelphia for Ben’s graduation from Penn. Ben doesn’t even want to go to his own graduation. In fact, just to prove the point to himself, because there is literally no one else there to give a shit, he sleeps in until eleven, and then, thinking of how disappointed his mother would be in him, dons his cap and gown and attempts to set up his camera and tripod in the hallway, where he takes three or four shots of himself in his academic regalia.

He looks at the paper he scribbled on last night, in between glasses of whiskey and cigars. It’s stupid, really. So fucking stupid.

 _I’ll be coming back to Twin Peaks soon_ , it says. _And maybe I’ve missed you, with your ridiculous little hats and your job as a librarian and your cocky stupid mouth and the way you talk to me like you don’t give a shit about me being Ben Horne or a powerful, wealthy guy, the way you talk to me like you just want me to know, you just want me to be myself. Maybe I’ll come by your house and maybe I’ll have flowers and I’ll talk to your father and I’ll take you out. Properly_.

Ben Horne doesn’t do romance. He doesn’t do meet-the-parents and he doesn’t do social calls that don’t end up in him making business connections or money, or getting a blow job in the guest bathroom. He doesn’t date for god’s sake. He smiles a little to himself as he stuffs a bunch of clothes in his duffel and tosses the cap and gown into the trash bin. He grabs his glasses and his keys. As he slaps a stamp on the envelope, determined not to second-guess this most grand romantic gesture of his life now, he thinks, just maybe.

*****

He makes it to Evanston in time to see Leland skip across the stage like the maniac he is. He slings his arm around his best friend’s shoulder and tries to take a few more pictures of them together, before they head to the liquor store and buy a twelve pack and sit on the campus by the edge of the water and get rip-roaringly drunk. He feels lighter, like some sort of decision that he had been trying to work through actually making has now actually been made. It hasn’t, but he convinces himself that it makes him feel better, so who the hell cares.

Leland is always a great distraction, with his good-natured, digressive, constant conversation. Musings about what a grand city Chicago is and how relieved he is to be done with college, although law school is not going to be a cakewalk. But Leland is smart and driven and Ben knows that whatever the Horne brand of success is, the Palmer brand of success is equally foreseeable, if the work ethic is a little different. Most often though, Leland’s discursions come back to his thoughts about Twin Peaks, and if Ben didn’t know better, he would think Leland was a bit obsessed. But Ben grew up there too, misses it too, and understands just as well its dark loveliness and unusual hold over people.

Ben props his feet up on a rock, taking a puff of his cigar, and half-listens to Leland ramble on about marrying Sarah and going to law school and what an epic summer they’re going to have before they have to really be adults. Ben gently reminds him that he has to be an adult now, that Horne’s and the Northern are both waiting for him, in addition to the little real estate ventures he’s been working on since he turned twenty-one.

“So you’re going to do it, right? You’re going to ask her?” Leland throws his beer can in the direction of a trashcan, possibly, and leans back, looking at Ben.

Ben straightens up and suddenly panics that he might have told Leland about Eileen at some point, maybe when he was drunk, or stoned, but he can’t remember. Best to play this cool, then. “Ask who what, Leland?”

“Sylvia. Sylvia,” he stresses the name. “Have you been listening to me at all?”

Actually, Ben hasn’t. He’s been thinking crazily of driving straight to the Mortimer house after he drops off Leland’s stupid ass. He knows he’ll probably look disheveled and smell even worse, but he so much wants to do this. Thoughts of Eileen and what the summer might hold for them are starting to consume him, and thus he can’t be instantly sure whether he told Leland or not. And it’s stupid, for the hundredth, for the thousandth time, he convinces himself he’s being stupid, that he just doesn’t do this sort of thing at all, but there it is. Ben wants to be reckless, and for once, he thinks, it’s not in a bad way. It’s in the best way possible.

“Are you going to ask Sylvia to marry you or not?” Leland presses on, and raises his eyebrows to Ben, questioning.

Ben slips off his shoes and stares out at the lake and thinks how different it is here in the midwest, how this body of water is expansive and placid and bucolic almost, not rushing and churning and stormy, like the falls at home. He chomps on his cigar and contemplates his answer, turning his head only slightly towards Leland’s expectant figure.

“No,” he says, quietly. “I don’t think so. Not yet.”

*****

“I’ll get it, dad.” Eileen swings the door to the slightly dilapidated two story brick house, where the shrubs need trimming and the flowerbeds need watering. Ben can almost see in her eyes the panic and her instant reaction to flee, to retreat. He’s holding a bouquet of yellow tulips, his only stop being the florist, after dropping off Leland, after nearly three days on the road from Illinois and he has to shake his head several times before he can even say the words, “What the ever loving fuck is this about?”

Eileen looks fragile and tired, and in an absolutely nonsensical way, more beautiful than he even remembered. Her raven hair is swept off her face and she is wearing a cream colored sundress, her white shoulders exposed, and he feels a burning in the back of his throat and wants to cry because she is in a wheelchair.

“Oh my god, Ben,” she gasps out, still clearly shocked by his presence here, even though she must’ve gotten his letter, right? He sent that out an eternity ago.

Ben’s pushing his way into the house now and turns on her, angry and hurt and disappointed, if he can even admit that. “Why didn’t you tell me about this? What is wrong with you?” he demands, and his mind unhelpfully snaps back to Leland, over winter break, in the bar, saying, “There is this one thing about Eileen that I heard.”

And because he wants to make everything about him, he yells, “Did you _keep this from me_?”

She looks like she wants to cry, in fact, she is crying, but no sound is coming out. She is just shaking and part of him wants to hold her, wants to wrap up those bony shoulders and kiss them. And the other part of him is so angry because she did withhold it, and she is ashamed for some reason, and she has completely lacked any faith in him to handle this. And he’s not handling it, at least not very well, so maybe she is right about that, he thinks ruefully.

Ben tugs on his curly hair, dropping the flowers on the coffee table strewn with paperwork and unopened mail. He is pacing in circles. “Tell me. Right now.”

“I wanted to tell you, I figured Leland would tell you, from Sarah,” she begins, now that she has stopped being incoherent. Her eyes are huge and scared and he doesn’t know what she is about to say but he’s sure that she has just changed everything. He looks at the incision from surgery at the top of her spine, and sees the tell-tale and too familiar marks on her wrists, clean and new and obviously deep, and most importantly, _not four years old_.

He stalks outside and leans against the side of the car and lights a cigarette. This time he does push the lit end very briefly into his own skin, just above his left wrist. He flinches at the pain and removes it, before taking a long drag. It’s stupid, it was all stupid, to hang something on a couple of conversations years ago, and a fleeting, attractive idea that resembles happiness and being known and actually having a person who understands him, and doing good, for once, ever. She should have been the best thing that ever happened to me, and he shakes his head, because now this. She’s still damaged and still being a psycho and the whole no expectations things leaves a really bad taste in his mouth. Fuck all this shit.

*****

The sound of the falls is hypnotic, strange and dark. Like a train rushing towards him a breakneck speed, like a tap being turned on that could never stop. It’s taken them months to even talk again, it’s almost fall, and this is what she wants to say now?

Ben shakes out a small laugh and turns to her, rolling his neck once or twice. “Do you expect me to do something?” he finally asks.

She shakes her small, dark head of curls. She looks so tiny in her camel colored winter coat, belt cinched tight around her waist, collar pulled against her white throat, against the grand backdrop of the falls, like she wants to look good for him tonight, like she wants him to ignore the chair. “I don’t expect anything. I’ve never expected anything. I just wanted you to know,” she says.

Ben rolls his shoulders now and tosses his cigarette over the edge of the falls. He imagines he could see the burn of orange a long way down. He holds out his hand to Eileen and she, without another thought, it seems, puts her delicate hand in his. “Dull,” he monotones. Will Hayward is exceedingly, excruciatingly dull. And good. And helpful. But Ben often sees what others do not see about Will, and that is, like every man, and especially every man in Twin Peaks, he has something simmering under his normalcy, something that he hides and secrets away from the world. Ben is more obvious about this kind of thing, but it also lets

him recognize the attempt in others. “You know he hates me?” he asks suddenly, gripping her hand a bit tighter. “Despises me, in fact. We won’t be able to be friends at all. I’ll probably never even speak to you again. How do you like that?”

Eileen suppresses an actual laugh and just smiles with the corners of her mouth. He’s allowing himself to be dramatic, to hide what he really feels, which is pathetic. “You’re getting carried away. Truly. You are a genius at getting carried away.”

She is teasing.He responds to teasing, from her, always. He grins. “Part of my charm, anyway.” This is something he can do. This feels like old times.

“Not likely.” But she is smiling too. Her thumb is unconsciously (or not) stroking small circles on the back on of his hand. She pauses. “But you know that I’m going to, right?”

Ben drops her hand. “Of course you’re going to. Why does this require any kind of conversation? I’m not offering you anything, I can’t offer you anything. For god’s sake, I’ve never even fucked you.”

Her body stills a little bit and she looks at him with eyes as wide as a tidepool and he feels a little lost, and guilty for being mean. “I know. But you’re my friend.”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” Ben stares off into the night, down to the falls, his face, not looking at her, pained and dark. “You’re going to do what you have to do. I’m not even a factor in this equation.”

“Ben,” she starts, softly.

“If I were. If I could be. Do I know?” he asks, insistent now.

“You know.”

He bends down, kisses her hand and when he looks up he is resigned, but not defeated. Everything wished for and contemplated and half-formed feels long ago now. He thinks they ruined it, and that’s not an unfair assignation to lay blame partly on her too. “I wish for you every good thing that is possible, my dear. And I don’t wish anything good ever, so I know you’ll believe me when I say it’s true.”

******

The sky is stormy the day Ben Horne marries Sylvia Grant and the wind thrashes the Douglas firs. Ben can’t help but feel a true, sickening sense of foreboding as he pushes the ring onto her finger, Leland standing helpfully by, and says, “For long as we both shall live.”

Afterwards he shakes hands and takes the congratulatory cigar and champagne and puts on a good spectacle, grinning like the hyper-pompous idiot that he is. It’s only when he’s alone, inhaling harshly for one second, after seeing Eileen, wrapped in a green sweater that makes her look like some woodland sprite or elf out of a fairy tale, with Will Hayward’s arm snaked protectively around her, that he lights his cigarette and has to fight off the old urge to press it into his skin so that it burns, and not just his lungs, on every intake of breath.

The sky is clear and a beautiful blue so rarely seen in those parts, on the day Eileen Mortimer marries Will Hayward. Ben doesn’t attend the wedding, because actually he isn’t even fucking invited. It’s some rinky-dink backyard affair at the home of Will’s aging parents, probably complete with cucumber sandwiches that are really cut from Wonder Bread and C-list champagne, and Ben doesn’t want to be part of that godawful local townie idiocy anyway.

If he goes to see Catherine and fucks her a little bit harder that night, holding her down until he bruises her hips and leaves scratches across her back, then that’s nobody’s goddamn business either.

*****

Life is easy and hard at the same time. Horne’s is a well-oiled machine. The Northern is his pride and joy. He loves strutting around like he owns the place, because he _fucking owns the place_. He holes himself up in his wood paneled office, fire blazing, and kicks up his feet because he is the king of this whole goddamn thing. He makes investments and real estate purchases. Some are good, some not so good, but it just rolls off Ben’s back.

He goes to the bank one day and sees his bank account has $320,000 cash in it. Jerry is in Europe. Leland is in law school. He has sex with Catherine on the regular. She’s more creative and meaner than Sylvia is, but it passes the time. And he kind of likes the idea that she thinks she has him, she thinks she has something over him, thinks she knows something about him, about how he is or even better, who he is. He wants to laugh at her because clearly that idea is beyond ridiculous, but he figures he’ll save it up. Her hubris when it comes to him may be something of use some day. That’s Ben Horne now, always two steps ahead.

He knows Sylvia is crazy, and the thing is, he knew it before too. Just before, craziness meant she would sneak to his room at the Northern after everyone else had gone to sleep and wake him up with sex, or how she would laugh with so much abandon, her head thrown back and hair tangled with the wind and the trees, and Ben thought it sounded like freedom. Now, he realizes that it’s not just that she is crazy. It’s that she’s angry too. All the time. And this manifests itself even more, as if there could be more than _all the fucking time_ , he thinks keenly, now that they have Johnny.

Whatever is wrong with Johnny, neither of them can do a damn thing about it, so Sylvia blames him, saying she’s not the one with mental illness on her side of the family, and Ben bristles at that, at even the slightest allusion to his mother, and spits out, “if there’s no mental illness on your side of the family then what the hell happened to you?”

Johnny wails and flails about and is only comforted slightly when he has the feather headdress on. He is barely eighteen months old and neither of them hold him or kiss him or interact at all. Sylvia develops “headaches” and retreats into her disturbed and angry world where she rails against Ben, and Ben retreats into work and money and getting the best business deal and having sex with Catherine Martell once in a while.

Ben can see Johnny from where he walks by the lounge at the Northern and he has to do a double-take because Johnny is not squawking or panicking or being like a human octopus. He’s sitting on the lap of Eileen, her chair rolled up to the table, and they are moving blocks around to build a house or something.

“What are you doing here?” His tone comes off as demanding, he realizes, but he can’t help but watch in abject fascination as Johnny pushes a block across towards Eileen’s pile of blocks, and she shifts him in her arms.

“Oh,” Eileen looks up. “I was supposed to have tea with Sylvia, but she got a headache and Johnny was crying, so she went upstairs to get something for it.” She pauses. “That was twenty minutes ago though, so I don’t think she is coming back.”

“Astute,” Ben cannot help but snark, and sits down across the table from them, leaning in.

Eileen smiles, nodding at Johnny’s tiny shape, and then back to Ben. “You did good here, Ben,” she says. “Really really good.”

Ben has never felt more helpless in his life. His own understanding of Johnny, of his disability, of what to do about it, of how to even be a father to his own kid, are so limited, but here is Eileen, cradling him and looking at both of them like there’s wonder in the world and she has just seen it.

“He’s just like you.” She takes Johnny’s headdress off to run her hand through his dark baby curls. Ben expects Johnny to completely go crazy with the loss of his headdress and someone touching him, but he doesn’t. He gurgles a little and sticks his hand in his mouth.

“He’s always fighting. Like he’s trying to get something out. Trying to get people to understand.”

She nods, not looking at Ben, a small smile curling up. “Like I said...”

“I don’t even know how you’re doing this. He is never like this, for me or for Sylvia.” Ben shakes his head and reaches out to touch Johnny’s hand. This is something he has never done and he still feels completely out of his depth, but he can’t help it. He’s transfixed by this, that Johnny might be something other than loud and hurting and angry too. Johnny curls his miniature hand, which is now wet from where he had been sucking on it, around Ben’s finger for just a second and Ben feels a barrage of emotions. Even though Johnny has dropped his finger and gone back to the blocks, Ben has to blink rapidly to stop the tears from coming this instant.

“He’s beautiful, Ben.” She’s looking at him, with those big eyes wide open and for a moment or ten thousand, he feels like he would do anything for her, for giving him this, for seeing this, for not judging him for this. “He’s special, just like you.”

Ben is trembling and he feels like he has somehow cracked open a piece of knowledge about himself that was hidden, that he wanted to hide for so long. Everything fits into its proper slot, has always fit in this certain way that he doesn’t like to question: Ben is privileged and Sylvia is crazy and Johnny is sick and Jerry is in Europe and mother is gone and Eileen is indescribable. And now he feels it for just one moment, what he wants. Ben really doesn’t know, has never known, how to be good.

But he wants to be good.

“Have dinner with me,” he blurts out.

*****

Dinner turns out to be just ice cream and a bowls full of toppings in Suite 317, after Ben calls and gets a pretty blonde staff member to take Johnny back to his nursery. He winks and tips her well and figures using all of his charm now can’t hurt as he’s wheeling Eileen to the room.

They’re kind of on a sugar high and Eileen has a tiny bit of whipped cream on the corner of her mouth. Ben points it out to her and she giggles and her tongue darts out to lick it away and Ben cannot believe himself, cannot help himself, and he gasps a little bit.

“I don’t know why things turned out like this. I hate this,” he says, frustrated, after he cleans the spoon on the forest green napkin, monogrammed with The Great Northern in gold stitching. He sets their bowls down on the bureau and sits gingerly on the edge of the bed. He knows what happens next here and feels surprisingly confused on how to go about it.

Eileen snorts a little under her breath and responds, “You don’t want to know why things turned out like this, Ben. You shouldn’t pretend with me.” She cuts to the chase, like always. “You’ve been denying and running and passive-aggressively starting and stopping this thing for years now.”

“What are you even talking about?”

“Come on, Ben. I offered years ago, and you said not yet. You wrote me letters, piles and piles of letters from college, saying a thousand nothings over and over again, as if I was supposed to hang onto that, like some dumbstruck naive kid who had been left behind.” Her voice is strained and emotional, but not cruel. It’s just the truth, and it’s hard, because Ben hates criticism just like everybody else, but he can also take it, especially from this girl, because she knows him. She does.

“We didn’t have any expectations, because we weren’t anything to each other, we weren’t even friends! We were just two kids who kind of liked each other and were messed up in our own ways.” She stares at him and says quietly, “If you wanted something else, you could have made it something else. And that’s the truth.”

“You could’ve made it something else too!” He has no choice to defend himself, because it’s not all him.

They don’t speak for several minutes and he can see that the sky outside is turning darker now, that it’s in the perpetual state of threatening to erupt. He finally says, “I want to make it something else now.”

“Oh, because there are consequences now and people who care about us, people who married us? People that we made promises to?”

He shakes his head in disgust, starts to become angry and annoyed by this endless cock tease.

“So you’re saying that you didn’t think any of this was a possibility when you agreed to come with me to a suite in my hotel? That you’re not as obsessed about this whole thing, about us, as I am? Spare me!”

Her eyes are clear and she starts, “I didn’t -”

Ben stands. “Shut up! Just shut the fuck up!” And he growls, an almost inhuman sound coming from him, as he lunges forward and kisses her.

She kisses back though, and wraps her arms around his neck as he pulls her roughly from the chair and sends them toppling onto the bed.

“God, just shut up, shut up, shut up,” he is babbling now, as he undoes the buttons on her gray silk blouse, spreading kisses across her ivory skin. Her head is thrown back and she’s breathing heavily. Ben pulls up her wool skirt to run his palms flat across her thighs. He’s not even sure she can feel this, and when he hooks his fingers into the waistband of her blue panties, he looks up. “Last chance to stop me,” he murmurs, with a predatory smile.

Her eyes meet his and they’re indescribable and suddenly Ben isn’t sure at all, what he’s doing, why he’s doing this. “Never going to stop you,” she murmurs. “Don’t want to stop you.”

So he unzips his trousers and feels how wet she is, how ready she is, and knows this is years in the making, knows that this is definitely not about him trying to be good, and he doesn’t stop.

*****

The overhead lights of the hospital cast everything in a peculiar yellow glow that Ben finds disturbing. The antiseptic smell of hospital soap and how everything has to be so clean rub him the wrong way and crack at his bones as he walks along the hallway of the OB wing. He sees the babies wrapped snuggly in their blue and pink pastel blankies, tucked away in perfect rows behind a wall of glass. Stay in there, where it’s safe, his mind supplies, as he drums his fingers on the ledge just below the glass.

The name _Donna Hayward_ is what he’s searching for without knowing it, and he regards her coolly. She looks a little bit like Audrey did, but then all babies look alike, and even more alike when you’re Ben and have zero interest in them at all. Audrey is six months old now and an absolute terror that Ben loves fiercely and protectively, if only in his heart and not so often in practice. Looking at this creature, Donna Hayward, with tiny tufts of dark hair peaking out of her knitted pink cap, he feels a similar protectiveness.

It’s Will who knocks him quickly out of his reverie and places a firm hand on Ben’s shoulder. “There she is,” he says quietly and Ben just nods.

Ben turns to the older man and must look expectant because Will says, “Ben.”

“What are you trying to tell me here, Will? What am I even looking at?”

Will’s face is turned toward the nursery, towards Donna, his daughter. His blue eyes are sharp, a little angry. “You must know,” he says, his tone weary.

“Right. Okay, then.” Ben snaps back to his usual mode of defiance, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his suit pants.

“You don’t need to ruin any lives here, Ben. There’s no need to go and open old wounds. It’s just going to be harder for everyone in the long run.”

Ben straightens up and spits out, “Look, I’m not going to -”

“You think she’s the only one who knows you, who sees what you’re all about.” Will’s voice matches his eyes now. “I know you. I see what you’re all about.”

Will shoves four fingers into Ben’s chest, hard. “I am telling you, no good can come of this. So if you want to do something good, if you want to try to be good, here’s your chance. Let’s just agree to leave this alone. Let’s just live our fucking lives.”

Ben steps away and smoothes his hands over his suit lapels. “And this is what Eileen wants too?”

Will backs off and puffs out a breath, like he’s been holding it in. “Yes. Of course. And Sylvia would too, if she even knew.”

Ben doesn’t like this, he doesn’t like to be told what to do. And if this, if Donna, is his own child, the knowledge of that is going to gnaw at him forever. But the thing about Ben is, he’s good at secrets. Despite his somewhat whimsical and seemingly flamboyant temperament, he can sit on a secret, on a piece of unshared knowledge, for as long as it takes to be useful, for as long as it takes to give him some advantage. He’s a time bomb, and this one will just have to wait.

*****

In the protection of his office enclave, he can admit that sending the roses is going to be a dick move. Oh yes, Ben is sure of this, but he also knows that he can’t stop just doing what he wants. It’s the thing inside him that’s always at war, the desire to actually do good, to actually be good, which is something that he’s a total amateur at, and the instinct, ingrained from years of privilege and power and simple want, to find what he wants and take, take, take, and hold on for dear life. And at that, he is a consummate professional.

He wants to do the right thing, which is not lie anymore, and Will should respect that. He knows Eileen is backing away mostly out of self-preservation, and if anybody knows anything about self-preservation, it’s Benjamin Horne. But she also doesn’t want a fight with Will, doesn’t want a breakdown from Donna, or a confrontation with Sylvia. Ben frankly doesn’t care about any of that.

Maybe before, things were complicated at their worst, but now. Now? When Ben takes stock of his life he finds that he’s left things pretty unattended, as far as goodness and honesty go. So fuck it. He made promises to Will, and by proxy, to Eileen, to stay out of it and let them live their lives, and hasn’t he? For god’s sake, his best friend killed Laura and then killed himself, and he was accused of it, and their lives have all been shot to hell for a couple of years now.

He doesn’t want to fail Audrey, and maybe, doesn’t want to fail Donna either.

Being good doesn’t come easy, even _trying_ to be good doesn’t come easy. Most days he’s not sure that there is such a thing as happiness, but he said it before and he knows it now: he wants to build a life in happiness. It was but a whisper of a promise, said to him over strawberry shakes, in the diner long ago, but it was there, and everybody has fucking reneged on that, and now Ben has decided he wants it. So what are they going to do about it?

When the girl on the other end of the phone asks what the card should read, he shakes his head. “No card,” he says, feeling a tad smug. “She knows.”

*****

Ben’s cheek is pressed against the harshly cold linoleum floor of the hospital, the light alternating between blinding and dim, all around him. He can feel the dangerous, comforting warmth of what can only be blood, pooling at the base of his skull, trickling slowly onto his collar. He tastes salt and tanginess, his lip is split open.

Will is standing over him, or somewhere behind him, to his right. Ben cannot see, his vision is blurred, and he imagines briefly that Will is a nameless, faceless giant, instead of the cold, burdened, cowardly, and infinitely small man that he is. _Do no harm, my ass_ , Ben thinks bitterly.

Will is saying something, speaking loudly, something about ruining his relationship with Donna, something about only ever having Eileen’s interests in mind, something about being a family, something about Ben not leaving well enough alone, something about that it had to come to this.

Ben feels pain jolt through his body, along his stomach and his ribs, as he struggles to push himself off the floor.

“And you’re going to do what I say, Ben. I mean it.” Will is still spouting off his nonsense, and all Ben can hear now is the rush of the falls, and a melancholy song about falling in love and a nightingale, and his mother’s laugh, and all he can see is Eileen holding Johnny in her lap, Eileen staring at him with those eyes, fixated on him like true north, Eileen staring up at the sky, indescribable.

“You’re going to leave my family alone. For good. I’ll see to it, I can promise you that,” Will’s voice is rough and shaking. Ben wants to laugh, god he wants to laugh like a total maniac.

Ben balls his right hand into a fist. He pushes up from the ground and grits out, “No. I don’t think so.” He gets to his knees. Ben is a survivor and he will survive a lot worse than this. Will looks fucking scared. He should look _fucking scared._

He rolls his shoulder and cracks his neck, cocking his head to the side. He locks his gaze on Will. He can see clearly now. “Not yet.”

*****


End file.
